Forum Moderators: buckworks
Is this the way to do it? my other site has both the information pages mixed with the products for sale, and the page rank and keywords results is pretty low. would it help to separate the two so that the main page without anything for sale on it would be looked upon as more informative (and authoritative) than if we're trying to sell something behind?
I would definitely be a revolution from SEO standpoint. Static informative pages are likely to achieve higher PR and keyword ranks on SEs. Once that page attracts good amount of traffic, they would read the info' and based on the quality of the content and products on sale, execute a financial transaction.
In a nut shell, you are in the right direction.
The whole reason I did it, was because the owner of the company didn't want to upgrade the shopping cart, and we didn't have near enough control of what the dynamic pages looked like. So it all evolved to use Dreamweaver for the info site, and the CMS for the store and handle the orders.
As for search ranking, we have several major key phrases and words at #1 and most of the rest in top 5, all going to the information site, even though the dynamic store has lot of the same information in the item descriptions.
We've had a few SEO and Web consultants in here and ALL of them insisted we are doing it wrong and should buy another package (and hire them to maintain it). But if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Can pm you the site addie if want to see what I'm talking about.
Dan
That said OSCommerce has some duplicate content issues all it's own, although this can be pretty much solved by editing includes/modules/product_listing.php to remove the c_Path, manufactures_id and filter_id components of the links (does effect the display of breadcrumbs and the category box).
Splitting a site into informational and sales areas is an interesting idea though. The only thing I'd worry about is making it harder than it needs to be for people who simply want to make a purchase.
With the system we have implemented for our clients, the entire site is dynamically generated and there are no static pages. However, the sites consistently get top 5 rankings for general keywords, product categories and individual products. For categories and products, we are often #1.
The trick is in how the dynamic content is presented.
-Scott
I tend to put my static information pages right on the site along with the dynamic pages. If you are looking at my widget, you may also find a link nearby to the "How To" page. I never thought about doing this any other way.
my other site has both the information pages mixed with the products for sale, and the page rank and keywords results is pretty low.
So what will you need to do to get page rank and SERP's that can be found, for your new site? It sounds like you need to do that same thing on the existing site as well.
The only wrong way to approach this is to make your sites too complicated either for the visitor, or for yourself. Personally, I would be leery of reading something on one site, then getting sent to another to make the purchase. What you have proposed sounds a lot like you want the static site to rank well and send sales to the product site. The same thing can be done by placing a few well written articles around the web, and get more IBL's, which is what I might consider for your existing site.
My apologies if this is off base... I should probably be in bed trying to get well.
Sitemaps help google pick through the urls, just make sure there are no session id's in the urls when you submit a site map.
